As to Liana's secret inclination and Zesara's prospects I shall never once institute any conjectures, although I might erase them again before printing. I remember what came of it, when I and others, on a former occasion, covered over with our hands Hafenreffer's official reports upon matters of consequence, and undertook to unfold at length, by pure fancy, how things might have gone on;--it was of no use! And naturally enough; for women and Spanish houses have, to begin with, many _doors_ and few _windows_, and it is easier to _get_ into their hearts than to _look_ into them. Particularly maidens', I mean; since women, physiognomically and morally, are more strongly marked and boldly developed, I would rather undertake to guess at and so portray ten mothers than two daughters. The bodily portrait-painters make the same complaint. Whoever observes the influence of night, will find that the doubts and anxieties which he had contracted the evening previous about the heroine of his life it has, for the most part, completely killed by the time it gets to be towards morning. Albano, in the spring morning, opened his eyes upon life as in a triumphal car, and the fresh steeds stamped before it, and he could only let them have the reins. He alighted with his friend at Liana's after a few years, that is, days; the Minister had not yet come back. Heavens! how new and bloomingly young was her form, and yet how unchanged her demeanor! Why is it, thought he, that I can get only her motions, not all her features, by heart? Why can I not imprint this face, even to the least smile, like a holy antique, cleanly and deeply upon my brain, that so it may float before me in eternal presence? For this reason, my dear: young and beautiful forms are the very ones which are hard for the memory as for the pencil; and coarse, old, masculine ones easier for both. Again he filled himself with joys and sighs by looking at her,--and these were increased by the nearness of the garden, wherein June with his evening splendor lay encamped. O, if only _one_ moment could come to him, in which his whole soul might speak its inspiration! Out of doors there lay the young, fiery spring, basking, like an Antinoüs, in the garden, and the moon, impatient for the fair June-night, stood already under the gate of the east, and found the living day and the lingering sun still in the field. But the mother refused to the asking look of Liana the sight of sunset,--"on account of the unwholesome _Serein_."[136] Albano, with his heart full of manly blood, thought this maternal barrier around a child's health very small. The hour for shutting gates upon to-day's Eden would have struck for him the next minute, had it not been for the Captain and the _Cereus serpens_.